Welcome to Tyler

First day of classes for the first years, I am sure you are overwhelmed already but we second years are here to help!

First Friday @ InFusion Coffee & Tea Gallery

Erin M Riley is having a solo exhibition, Car Crashes and Other Sad Stories, at the Mt. Airy coffee shop InFusion Coffee & Tea. They are awesome enough to host a Mt. Airy First Friday Opening for me in their new space Peace Allley!

Opening Reception: August 1, 2008 from 7-9 pm

The address is:
7133 Germantown Avenue
Mt. Airy, Philly, PA 19119
Phone: 215.248.1718

I have been working on a lot of new stuff this summer and last semester and I will finally be able to show it all together and on beautiful brick walls nonetheless!! Please come by, hope to see you there! They have really good iced coffee!

Jonathan Dickstein - Sketchplay / Boxplay

Jonathan Dickstein, an incoming grad student in the ceramics department is having an opening the last Friday of this month at RED HOOK COFFEE & TEA.

So, if you're in the city, you should go, especially for the opening event, four legged friends are permitted. He mentions, "whatever you have planned, i guarantee that this will be at least partially as fun."

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SKETCHPLAY / BOXPLAY
work on paper and clay by jonathan dickstein

RED HOOK COFFEE & TEA
765 s. 4th st. (btw. fitzwater & catherine), Philadelphia, PA

OPENING!! friday, july 25th, 6 - 8pm

SOLID GOLD - Vox Populi

to MFA painter, R. Nick Barbee who got into the Solid Gold show at Vox Populi.

SOLID GOLD
June 6 - June 27, 2008
Opening Reception: First Friday, June 6, 2008 6-11pm

Vox Populi
319 N. 11th Street 3rd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Dave Kube's work on display at WWCC

William Way Community Center's Juried Art Show.

May 9 - July 26, 2008
Reception: Friday, May 9, 6-8pm

William Way Community Center
1315 Spruce St.
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215.732.2220

Hours: Monday - Friday: 9am - 10pm, Saturday: 10am - 7pm, Sunday: 10:30am - 7pm

Dave Kube, a Tyler photography grad student, will have two images on display at the William Way Community Center's 3rd Annual Juried Art Show.

Erin + Mike in Dirt Made My Lunch

Rebekah Templeton
c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t
173 W. GIRARD AVENUE
PHILADELPHIA, PA 19123
267-519-3884
INFO@REBEKAHTEMPLETON.COM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: APRIL 21, 2008
CONTACT: SARAH EBERLE/BEN WILL

Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Dirt Made My Lunch, a group exhibition guest curated by Todd Keyser. The exhibition highlights the work of Philadelphia’s first year Master of Fine Arts students featuring Erin M. Riley, Kurt Freyer, Michael Treffehn, and Robert Scobey, some of the city’s most promising young artists. The title references a creative process that is raw and malleable and still growing.

Erin M. Riley is a weaver and a mixed media artist. Riley’s work deals with her emotional issues involving family, personal history and relationships, but attempts to render these issues visually with a certain veil of universality. Using found images or personal images, she subsequently translate them into the tapestry language or into collages coated in resin or other plastics. She is interested in the soft, fluid and yet excruciating process of tapestry weaving juxtaposed to the fast nature of paper collages that are then sealed in a hard, permanent, water-proof material.

Kurt Freyer's video work explores art making at its most basic level, but the work itself is suggestive of something far more profound, in that a decorated egg and some candles on a mud hill can be used to identify the structural language of the art making process itself. Freyer's proposition is rooted in the questions of what art is. Freyer's video captures how something as seemingly elemental as mud and pigment can be used to communicate profound structural meaning.

Michael Treffehn’s work explores notions of cultural and biographical identity. He is also interested in suggested narratives and in presenting stories, but not in telling them. The video included in this exhibition is very still, causing the viewer to focus on the limited narrative and imagine the rest. What the viewer is seeing is only part of the story; the rest they must come up with on their own.

Robert Scobey's pop colleges display schizophrenic consumer images that expand into the real space. They shed their imageness and become their own environment. The work suggests that we are indeed in the next stage of simulacra in which images become a total reality beyond our own control.

Dirt Made My Lunch opens on Thursday, May 8, 2008 with an opening reception from 6-9 pm.

The exhibition includes video, textile weaving, photography, sculpture and installation. The show closes on Saturday, June 21, 2008.

Image: Robert Scobey, Miss February, 2008

Tyler MFAers at the PMA

In cooperation with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists is pleased to present:

“Emerging to Established: Twenty-five Years of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists”

Dates:
April 5 – July 6, 2008

Location:
The Philadelphia Museum of Art
Director’s Gallery, Ground Floor
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA 19130

Museum Hours:
Tuesday through Sunday: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Friday evenings: until 8:45 pm
Closed Mondays

Description:

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Philadelphia’s Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents this varied and accomplished selection of works on paper by twenty-five artists affiliated with the program over the years as Fellows, fellowship alumnae, or Advisory Committee members. One of CFEVA’s core activities is selecting its Fellows, a group of ten to thirteen of the city's most promising artists who are chosen by the Board of Artistic Advisors and invited to join the Career Development Program for a two-year period. These artists consistently have gone on to distinguish themselves -- locally, nationally, and internationally – and many are now leading figures in this city’s cultural life.

The mission of The Center for Emerging Visual Artists™ (CFEVA™) is to coordinate a stronger regional support system for visual artists, to advance the careers of the many deserving artists in the region, to promote relationships between artists and the communities in which they live, and to increase access to visual art for everyone.

Artists:

Katie Baldwin, Will Barnet, Rita Bernstein, Donald E. Camp, Anne Canfield, Andrea Cote, Vincent Desiderio, Elaine Erne, Vincent D. Feldman, Judy Gelles, **Christopher Hartshorne**, John Karpinski, Serge J-F. Levy, Kate Moran, Matthew Neff, Serena Perrone, Hiro Sakaguchi, Laurence Salzmann, Amy Stevens, Jeffrey Stockbridge, Ron Tarver, Judith Taylor, Lee Wilkinson, Douglas Takeshi Wolfe, Charlotte Yudis

A show opportunity for 1st year MFAs!

The first year painters got an e-mail sent to us about an upcoming show at Rebekah Templeton Gallery. The show is a survey of what first year MFAs in the Philadelphia area are up to, and will be up during May. The show is curated By Todd Keyser, who previously spent three years curating at Seraphin Gallery.

I e-mailed him to find out about it, and it is not just open to painters! It's all media, so everyone can submit work. According to Keyser, "The theme is really just a kind of general survey of what Philadelphia MFA's are up to. So I am looking for artists who are exploring what ever they are working on towards their thesis work. As for the size of the work, nothing over 60 inches, only because the space is small and we want each artists individual works to be able to breath."

Work should be submitted by the end of March, e-mail your statement and j pegs directly to the curator at tgkeyser (at) gmail.com

More exposure for you, if you want it!

***update: information via questions, "We are open to wall, floor, and video. We strongly encourage as much experimentation as possible." Mike Treffehn who asked about this mentions, "If anyone else is going to sumbit vieo, he said we could just upload it to a megaupload.com (or some other similar file-hosting site) and send the link to info@rebekahtempleton.com."

Studio Visit: Mike Treffehn

Ok ladies and gentlemen, another studio visit, its been a while, people are getting busy/very stressed and so studio visits will much more infrequent than they have been. Last day of spring break today, that means non stop MFA thesis shows and lots of art to make. So Mike is a first year sculpture guy, most widely recognized by his bright clothing among us drab art kids. He is always wearing florescent colors and very nice hats. So here comes Mike...


What are you working on?

I just finished a big set-ish installation in my studio that I was working on for a lot time -- thinking about, and then finally building. Drywall is hard, especially if you've a) never done it and b) got zilch for time. Right now I'm in sort of an in-between stage, thinking about what direction to go in next, and trying to plan ahead, too.

What are you excited about right now?

Things being boring. I've been really into it as an idea for a long time, but it's really resurfaced with a vengeance as of late. I mean unboring boring, not real boring. Basically, I've been listening to a lot of really minimal techno, and also a lot of funk (specifically Ricardo Villalobos for the former and James Brown for the latter). I'm really into the idea of something being really repetitive and unchanging with slight modal changes that end up making it really interesting and worthwhile. Like how James Brown can have a song that's ten minutes long and only has two chords. The tough part is now trying to figure out how to translate that to a physical/visual practice.

Favorite Vegetable?

It's tough, because I'm vegan so I've got a lot, but I'd have to say that it's tough to beat a really, really good fresh bell pepper -- there's just something so tremendously gratifying about biting into one.

Set, featuring Mike and Jenna:

Sound dictionary with participants Jess Perlitz and Dan Bruce:

Video Still:

Tyler grad's work selected for silent auction

Dave Kube, a first year photo grad, will be displaying two works of art in a silent auction to benefit Philadelphia's William Way Community Center.

The William Way Community Center Art Auction: Friday, March 28, 2007, 7:30 PM at the William Way Community Center. Come one, come all for the Center’s second annual art auction! You’ll have the opportunity to bid on over 20 pieces of art including paintings, photography, and industrial design. This is a once-a-year opportunity to purchase art from some of our best known and up-and-coming artists while supporting the Center. Tickets are $20 for members and $25 for non-members and can be purchased at www.waygay.org or by calling 215-732-2220.

Fiber Artists: Philadelphia #5

March 5th-30th, 2008

Opening reception:
Sunday, March 9th 1-5 pm.

Gallery:
DaVinci Art Alliance
704 Catharine Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147
(215) 829-0466

curated by K. Pannepacker, textile/visual artist

Hours:
Wednesday evenings: 6-8 pm
Saturday and Sunday: 1-5 pm.

This show includes art from a Tyler School of Art adjunct fibers professor, Amy Orr, a fibers grad Erin M Riley and an undergraduate Caroline Gardner.

AIGA Interview with Sara Alway

Sustainable Student Project Comes to Life:
An Interview with Sara Alway
by Craig Schlanser

A project I did last semester was featured on an online article on the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) Philadelphia chapter website. I mentioned this project to all the first years last semester, so if you want to learn more about "green" building...check it out.

http://www.aigaphilly.org/features_int-green.html

Studio Visit: Kerry Kolenut

Kerry is a first year photo grad. She is awesome, really quiet sometimes but you should always say hi to her. She makes pictures of houses and of people watching tv, she loves to edit in the dark, or low lit studio.

What are you working on?
I am photographing people watching t.v., communities that contain houses with similar structures and something else that I don't know how to do yet.

What are you really excited about right now?
Oh...so many things...emails from South Africa, Kerry G Photography, cheese and new adventures.

Do you believe/appreciate romance?
sure.

e.g. low lit studio, the photo grads share one room! 6 artists in one space, craziness:

Editing the houses:
Storage device!
Taking pictures of pictures:
Houses on the wall, Kerry is determined and focused on this project:

Studio Visit: Charlotte Rodenberg

We all know Charlotte! She is the super friendly first year painting grad who is always planning fantastic events for the grads. She was the OG bowling league member, she makes really awesome installations of/about trash and the city. She constructs the trash out of found or collected materials, its really incredible.

What are you working on?
What I enjoy most, is having several projects going on at once, all informing the other. Sometimes these works have a common ending point such as in a large scale installation, which has been growing since the Fall of 2007, titled "This is My Playground." Others share a similar concept yet are meant for other destinations such as a film, performance or sculpture.

What are you really excited about right now?
At the moment I am sorting my way through this mess of a studio (which I love) and misplacing some of my favorite objects in the city realm. I have a short stop animation boiling in my mind which is spawned from the idea of these installments.
Another project is along the lines of a social activism concerning the use of plastic bags at my local grocery store whom refuses to not only offer totes as an option, give minor rebates to those who do use totes and insist upon double bagging all groceries. I firmly believe that I can use my work as a catalysis for social change.

In one word how would you describe yourself?
curious.

A sunday in the studio with the husband:

Making an overturned shopping cart, or a shopping car that has been but wont be later, overturned:

Her supplies:

Mail box, pretty legit too!

And meters, much lighter and more fragile than their "real" counterparts:

Studio Visit: Sheryl Oppenheim

So Sheryl is a first year painter, she makes brightly colored paintings and is very ambitious. She is also the first non-crafts department person I have been able to do a complete studio visit with!! She recently, pretty single handedly, organized the Twofold Exhibition which seemed like a whole lot of work. She is also my roommate and I asked her a few questions and took a few pictures...

What are you working on ?
Visually consuming and appropriating everything I find interesting, from beach balls to the alphabet. A to B?

What are you really excited about right now?
Screen printing, my new diabetes medication, beach balls, egg rolls, Matt Curry's paintings, a sale on diet coke and room in my studio for more work!

In one word, how would you describe yourself?
Industrio-ridiculous or/and pancreas-challenged

We all have messy desks...I think its really just a more visual kind of organization:

Large paintings, small paintings, mixed media, collage, letters:

letters!:

Sheryl is learning to silkscreen, so far so good:

Studio Visit: Katie Miller

Katie is a first year glass grad. She works with beeswax castings of her body that she then duplicates/replicates and mirrors, though she is hardly predictable. One of my favorite things about Katie is that she has lots of tattoos and weird things in her ears like me, but we both drive suburban mom cars. I guess having a reliable car is one of those things that goes with being responsible...her studio is awesome, nice and warm but really loud. Those damn undergrads...

What are you working on?
My work is influenced by how the body's posture is reflective of life experience and the emotions within. I am curious of the reoccurring symmetry in nature and use my own body to investigate bisymmetry. I combine these interests to create sculptures reflective of the body's struggle to exhibit emotion as well as perfect bisymmetry.

What are you excited about right now?
Beeswax and contortionists. Cultural politics of body modification, hindu yoga postures.

Where's the best place you've been this year?
Arches National Park and Colorado National Monument

and so it goes......

General Studio Shot, she has the right diagonal half, sharing it with Zach Whitehurst:

Work area:
A piece of her body, beeswax smells so good:Beeswax melter thingy and fluids:

Storage area for beeswax parts, her studio is a treasure trove of body parts, you should go look!

Studio Visit: Kate Dowell

Kate is a first year ceramics artist. Her studio is almost as small as her, its located near the asexual bathroom near the ceramics rooms. She works from the body, though never worked so much from the body until she came to Tyler. I asked her questions, the third question changes every time (if you hadn't caught on).

What are you working on?
In clay, I am working on a figure in the "tornado safety position" which for me, as a child, was a position that invoked anxiety and dread. More importantly its a position of an anticipated attack. The carving represents a problem or disorder from the mind taking over, and the figure knows it, hence the position. So I guess its about trying to protect yourself from what you know is coming, what you are predespositioned for, but letting it happen at the same time. I'm also working on wire and paper self-sculptures from my measurements that are see through and I am researching psychology -- especially interested in heuristic vs. algorithm logic.

What are you excited about right now?
Spring. I'm tired of being cold. It sucks. My studio is cold. I'm excited about my classes too.....but it is still early in the semester. :)

Can you make a cake?!
Well, from the box yeah. Not from scratch. When it comes to decorating however, I think I'm pretty good. (she is good...some of her work from first semester was very cake-like)

General Studio Shot:

I like seeing what people pin up in their studios, inspiration, pictures:
The current work of art:
Pictures from her 15 credit review:

Studio Visit: Erin M Riley

Erin is the only first year fibers major, working primarily with weaving. She asked herself three questions that she will ask the other grads when she does a studio visit with them.

What are you working on?
Right now I am working on two things. Over break I made a wall loom in my studio and now I am weaving words on it with wool soaked in white latex paint. I got the words from a craigslist ad I posted about wanting to know the things parents always said in arguments (if you have any, I would like more!). I am also weaving a tapestry on my floor loom, another car crash, with wool that I dyed crazy colors and then I am going to bleach it all out.

What are you excited about right now?
I am very excited that I technically have two looms in my studio now. One is basically strings on nails but its working as a low tech loom. There is something about parallel strings, lots of them, on all sides of you. Its great to lie on the ground and look up at. That, and the fibers symposium is happening soon and the Massart painters are coming to Tyler for the Twofold exhibition. But that stuff is in March, February is just another month to get through.

What did you have for breakfast?
Today I skipped breakfast, I had a vegan chocolate chip cookie that I made and then opted for a vegan chicken patty at the Starving Artist. That place is terrible, but its cheap.

Now for pictures:

Floor loom, dyed yarn.

Wall loom, part of the words...

Very messy desk:

Equally messy yarn closet:

Picture of the beginning of the next tapestry..just blank color for 48"...

.....Then a car crash!

Thanks for looking, I hope to do this for everyone, let me know when you are available!!